On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 8:54 AM, Alex Brollo alex.brollo@gmail.com wrote:
You can force png rendering both by preferences and by code. But what's more interesting is the use of badly documented \scriptstyle TeX tag, which generates a much smaller and less "invasive" display of pngs:
The use of scriptstyle to control font size is an ugly hack that makes many formulas less readable. For example, <math>2^{A_C},</math> and <math>2^{A}C,</math> become much harder to distinguish in scriptstyle.
In a custom installation, you can tweak the font size in images by changing the value of the "-D" parameter in line 8 of render.ml and recompiling texvc.
The ideal solution for Wikipedia would be to move to a system in which users with relatively modern browsers don't see images at all. There is already a candidate for that system: MathJax. This has extensive browser compatibility [1] and is actively maintained, with some big-name sponsors behind it [2]. The main difficulties enabling it on WIkipedia would be configuration and checking for any inconsistencies with texvc (so the main limitation is developer interest). On a custom install without a huge base of existing text, you could probably just use Extension:MathJax, although I haven't tried it.
- Carl
1: http://www.mathjax.org/resources/browser-compatibility/ 2: http://www.mathjax.org/sponsors/